me_irl
me_irl
161 comments
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I'm over 40 and struggling not to conclude life on this planet peaked 30 years ago
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The 90s were seriously such a bop.
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You might even call it an Mmmbop.
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If you were a kid in the 90s, sure. Your parents shielded you from all the chaos.
The 90s also had terrorism (IRA, WTC bombing, German and French hijackings, Israeli settler massacre, sarin gas attack in Japan, Oklahoma City bombing, bombings of US service members in Saudi Arabia, PKK suicide bombers in Turkey, Dagestan bombing in Russia (possibly a Putin-orchestrated false flag)). It had the ongoing AIDS epidemic, which was terrifying. It had the first Gulf war. It had the LA riots of 1992. It had the columbine shooting.
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That was 10 years ago.
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The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.
Put a bird on it.
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Hey, at least you got to enjoy humanity's peak as a teenager. I was a kid, so I never got the chance to fully appreciate the 90s. My memory of almost anything pre-1993 is incredibly hazy. My strongest childhood memories didn't take hold until the decade was almost over.
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Lucky you. I got at best the earliest of the 2010s...
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Yep. It peaked right around Ronnie Reagan's sell-out to the wealthy. If folks want a better quality of life they will have to take it back from the rich.
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I remember agreeing with that back in 2021 when it was posted, and now, well...
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I landed a job a job at a company that’s circling the drain, I feel like a parasite feeding off a host until it’s gone and I move to a new one
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I'm a public librarian. Just dreading the day we are defunded. They’ve already attacked our national orgs.
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Absolutely know the feeling
When I quit a few years ago are my last employer, I was thinking, I'm the rat leaving the sinking ship
Fucking card house still hasn't collapsed somehow and old employer is now my main customer.
So...not much changed, besides that I don't have much security anymoreBut hey! Illusion of freedom, when being self employed! ;-)
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A while ago, I was talking to my mum and offhandedly said that I'd have to move north at some point in my life, due to climate change. For me, that's just a given, with record hottest summers coming in regularly and current summers already incapacitating me for weeks at a time.
But my mum's reaction was basically "What's this about now?". She's lived in her childhood town or close-by for basically her whole life. And she's old enough that she doesn't have to worry about the aftermath. But yeah, that was still brutal, how different our realities were in that regard.
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The Upper Peninsula is starting to look quite nice this time of year...
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Well, interestingly, gen z men are the Trumpiest demographic:
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/11/american-gen-z-podcasts-trump-harris
I guess the meme still holds true, but their concerns about the future are very different. TBH I can totally understand them becoming disillusioned with other old politicians following old voters who will just “do nothing at let it all happen.”
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This is the saddiest shit ever. Young men being angry at the « Men » will vote for the men that will sold them to the bone mill in a heart beat.
There’s a Turkish proverb : and the forest vote for the axe because they where made of the same wood
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What a great proverb. Thank you for that.
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I know a surprisingly large amount of MAGA/Trump adjacent fans because of my type of work.
- They're all single dudes. Maybe divorced. Maybe never went on a date.
- There's Joe Rogan involved.
- After a few beers, they all will unprompted share their views on Jews, blacks, trans, lesbians, or some other racist shit then back off and pretend it's just a joke.
- Tell them anything involving empathy "Sorry your dog died" is met with silence or coldness.
- They all don't give a shit about anybody else besides themselves. And often see themselves as the victim. "Oh Trans person was brutally beaten? Yeah it's a violent world like one time some guy threatened me gotta stay strapped."
- They may not like Trump's antics. But to them, the Democrats aren't helping THEM. Remember that lack of empathy?
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They may not like Trump’s antics. But to them, the Democrats aren’t helping THEM. Remember that lack of empathy?
Unless they make 6 figures that point is true though. Not that Trump is going to help them either. But at least he pretends to care about them, whereas the Democrats outright said that their life reality of rising prices and stagnating wages is fake because the stock market is making new record bubble numbers.
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They may not like Trump’s antics. But to them, the Democrats aren’t helping THEM. Remember that lack of empathy?
Thats the main one though. Truth is there are a lot of working class white Americans with no representation. Working class minorities tend to band together to weather the worst of it, and are maybe somewhat represented by candidates who come from minority backgrounds. But the working class whites? All they have is the orange clump and a sea of sick media posts from a deranged billionaire telling them that immigrants are the cause of all their woes.
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Who are the positive role models? Weve got all these young guys watching sniveling cucks like andrew taint
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Literally everybody else. They don't lack role models, they just actively seek out the sociopathic assholes who reminds them the most of themselves.
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It's easy to paint a picture on a blank canvas.
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They misattribute monetary policy that bids up home and asset values using cheap debt and facilitates massive bailouts with federal government policy. The CPI doesnt include asset prices so cheap debt can flood into asset prices without slowing down the devaluation of their salary, it also does subjective inflation deductions to goods based on perceived quality changes, and excludes much of the shrinkflation thats happens to goods and service quality.
Something as basic like getting support for a flight is now talking to a chatbot with perpetually larger than expected call volume, you pay extra for seating, you pay extra for baggage; and your seat is so small now you also may as well be standing. Free range chickens used to just be called chicken, and eggs could be eaten uncooked since they werent swimming in ecoli, but according to the CPI you're significantly better off now; so the nominal value of a boomers house is now worth significantly more due to all this perceived wealth.
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See 'normative alexithymia'
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Hell, I'm 46 and it's really hard to not be cynical these days. I want to believe there's still good people out there but I run into so many assholes.
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I'm also 40 something. Oh for the dizzy optimism of the 90s...
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Optimism? Do you remember the entire grunge movement? GenX is full of apathy and pessimism. I still remember the day Kurt died, it was a defining moment in our lives.
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Uhh,, ok hmm..so I learned in life if everyone you see is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
Think about it this way: there are countless good people in your life but as a society we get taught to get fixated on the worst to complain about. Maybe it’s more entertaining. Maybe we sync to it cuz maybe we have similar features in ourselves we don’t like … which ever the reason it’s personal why we do this. But in doing so It’s easy to discount the good people by ignoring them and what they do. We notice every mistake and bad person out there.
And how do you think that makes good people around you feel?
Well they stop coming around. They get drained from being ignored. They put up boundaries where they don’t want to be around assholes fixated on the negative and don’t spend their time on assholes.
And that’s how we become assholes telling on ourselves by admitting everyone is assholes.
It’s the shoe smells like shit every where you go analogy.
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Uhh, ok hmm…so I learned in life if everyone you see is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
I lived by this phrase until I realized that most people are so blitheringly stupid that they are by default "assholes." I still treat everyone with respect and compassion, but I don't feel connected or very sympathetic to anyone anymore because now I know the truth and it's dark and if you don't see the broad, creeping darkness that is covering everything right now, you're choosing willful ignorance over community. You can still build community and make things better even accepting that there are lots of terrible assholes out there who will also benefit from your efforts.
Lack of curiosity, willful ignorance, science denial, choosing emotionally-pandering media, tuning out and not caring about anything outside of their immediate stimulation-sphere, creates a whole lot of people who aren't even thinking themselves better than you, because they're not thinking. People are training themselves broadly to not think and we're living in the effects of this decision.
Every time you choose to surround yourself with media and people whom would never argue or disagree with your notions, every time you say "I can't deal with this" every time you sneer at someone's personal story, every time you spend an hour scrolling social media, every time you avoid learning new things, you are pushing that "societal asshole meter" higher and higher.
And all of this doesn't even begin to touch on the very real, very prevalent people who are fucking hateful. Again, you can choose to be blind to other people's hate if you're not of the demographic that experiences being hated for arbitrary reasons, but there are plenty of people who are hated and bullied every day by people who are indeed, evil. We can't be afraid to call a goddamn spade a spade.
And people (like you) who are trying to convince us that spades are not spades, are upholding an unfair and deeply oppressive system because they have either privilege of class, race or ignorance.
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I think they've got it the wrong way around. The under 40s have a chance of rebuilding after the war. Yes, there are hard times ahead but they are young enough to come out on the other side.
At 49, I'm quite sure I either won't make it through the coming storm at all or at least won't be able to enjoy the aftermath for long once things get better again.
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The under 40s are going to be the ones fighting the wars, as always. Even if there is an other side for humanity after what's coming, no one alive today will ever have a peaceful life ever again.
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The under 40s will be sent to die at the front
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(i am under 40)
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My parents just stopped watching the news about anything and just sit thinking everything will be okay. Its starting to get difficult to have a relationship with them because they are so out of touch with reality. They even go to protests but for them its just a thing to go do because they're not doing anything else. They have zero understanding of any of the reasons they're happening other than trump bad.
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Idk man, I’d kill just to have mine agree on the trump bad part. You do you, but tuning out our shit news cycle is low on the offense scale for me. It can be much worse.
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My Mom is so disappointed that my kids are not active, do not goto protests. She wants to leave a better world for them but is no longer able to help make that happen, so needs to see her grandchildren turn the world around.
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In effect the relative lack of news back in the day was how people could feel optimistic, at least in the US and Western Europe. We could be pretty oblivious and happy about USSR going away and all seemed just fine because the news barely covered the bad stuff and the Internet was barely a thing and we didn't get a whole lot of global exposure.
Things can get better and we have to work at it, but we don't need to be hopeless. If we can't believe good things can happen, then what would be the point anyway...
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If we can't believe good things can happen, then what would be the point anyway...
Two things:
- Being kind to others, making their lives a bit less painful and hopefully a bit more joyful.
- Spite. Opting out would be making the lives of the bastards who are inflicting the bullshit on the rest of us too easy.
I don't expect things to get better within my lifetime and I'm not yet 40. All that I've witnessed in my lifetime is an accelerating decline in financial stability for people who work for a living and continual degradation of the quality of basic goods that people are able to afford.
I managed to not get totally fucked during the pandemic after having been set back probably about a decade and a half by The Recession. Now, my field is getting hit by regular layoffs that don't actually benefit anyone but make the line go up. Shit is not looking good in the near future.
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Exactly, in times of doom, you have to believe and hope, much more than ever before.
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lol, the other day my Boomer Dad said, "Everything will work out. You have to think positively."
Based on WHAT? Nothing has "just worked out" for at least 25 years.
As a cohort, Boomers ushered in this paradigm, and remain completely oblivious to the world. I will probably never stop heaping culpability at their feet.
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At this point we have to contend with small wins like Die Linke getting almost 10% of the vote in Germany, Elon Musk getting bullied out of politics, and Carney winning in Canada.
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I won't contend with small wins anymore. I want it all, heaven or hell
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PEACE JUSTICE AND ANARCHY
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Unfortunately Musk didn't get bullied out of politics, his office was always meant to expire at the beginning of May. He achieved what he set out to do: dismantling federal government completely to make deruglation, tax avoidance and corruption much easier.
This is just him doing the typical right wing martyrdom whining whenever somebody criticises them.
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Die Linke (Formel SPD) used to be close to a majority in our parents time.
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Dutton getting his arse absolutely handed to him in Australia, ditto palmer
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am 40. still feel this way.
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over 50 and felt this way for over half the millenia and before that felt it likely to be that way given how things were going.
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I'm quickly catching up to your age and I don't really understand either why it would be a young people thing either. (not that I'm not still young of course, my white hair are just an affectation)
It's just a matter of looking around.-
Welcome to the age of the smartphone, where we're more informed while being more misinformed and where we're all connected but can't actually connect. We've hit the point where people can watch something, stare the truth in the eye and say "that's a lie" or be told an obvious lie that could be disproved in less than a minute and say "that's so true."
There's no easy way out of the hole now either. If the government stepped in, the people spreading lies would simply lie and say the government was misleading people and people would gobble it up, and there's no way I'd trust anything privately owned to tell me the truth.
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Everyone over 40: "Yup, social media has really fucked those kids' brains up"
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I am well over 40 and I agree with OP. Then again, I didn't give up my empathy at the door to adulthood.
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Whereas the reality is that things are so fucked because these idiots get their news from Facebook. The Trump administration admitted to making a mistake deporting Kilmer Garcia - they’ll never find out because they’re too busy sharing OAN articles about that trans women they bullied out of fencing.
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Social media was a mistake. User age has nothing to do with it.
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Judging by the typical Facebookfeed, I’d strongly argue the opposite.
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I have seen so many 50+ year olds that waste several hours a day doomscrolling Facebook say this unironically.
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I'm glad to see folks talking on here. Makes me feel better knowing we're here all going through it. Gives me that Band of Brothers vibe "We stand alone, together."
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If the cure to existential dread is turning 40, it can't come soon enough.
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I turned 40 this year. Sadly it hasn't helped my existential dread at all.
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Intense workouts everyday I’m able to has helped me significantly.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it definitely is not.
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Look at the bright side: every day is the best day of the rest of our lives!
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Translation: every day will be worse than the last until death. I agree.
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Is that from "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego Movie? Movie now seems much darker.
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Half a century here, I've never had a time in my life where the next year was better than the last
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Same age-ish, and I feel the same.
The hard part is trying to figure out what part of that comes from societal collapse, and how much of that comes from just getting older and seeing more and more of how the world works... or doesn't work.
Despite all we see and hear, objectively the world is better than it's ever been. We are at a shocking low level of international conflict, starvation, disease, crime, famine, even teen pregnancy has fallen to the lowest rates we've ever seen.
But all of these gains have been made by people forming communities of various kinds, of linking up, sharing ideals and compiling resources. This "downturn" we're feeling is a localized result of a lot of people turning their backs on community.
We are incredibly communal animals, we need social identities to survive. This has been studied. When community abandons you, or when it feels like they have, people broadly stop caring about things and themselves and become selfish, bitter, cynical and hateful. We're feeling this all around us, and inside us. And I don't think it's a natural phenomenon, there are active groups working to cause this, they want to undo all that progress and bypass war and pillaging and destruction and just rot out the world's wealthiest countries from the inside out.
I don't know if these objective, global gains will continue for everyone. But I fully believe that the USA at least is in a nose-dive it won't pull out of. Things are breaking as we speak, in ways we can't repair.
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Kind of feels like there's two kinds of people out there right now in the US. Once you think we're fucked, and the ones who think they have enough generational wealth that "their" kids won't be fucked.
There's probably a sizeable third pool out there that are just watching propaganda and going everything is fine everybody's overreacting or I don't care it doesn't affect me. I think even that pool's shrinking a bit.
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There's also people who are absolutely going to get fucked but are still living in a comfortable dream-world where they think someone is going to come make everything normal again.
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There are whole swathes of us who are still foolishly optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive too.
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I fear we're into parachute territory, we'll need to rebuild the plane from parts after we touch down.
Please don't let it be a Lost sequel...Please.....
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optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive
To be precise, they think someone else is going to pull us out of the nose-dive, and that because we've had a lifetime of comforts and status-quo, there's no chance of bad things happening to them personally... that's just stuff that happens on TV, right???
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I wouldn’t be gentle. But then again both my parents are dead so I don’t actually have anyone to be bitter at.
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Expectation is the main ingredient to disappointment. All you have to do is lower your expectations to where the bar is, so when good things do happen, it'll feel better when they do.
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That just sounds like a race to the bottom to me
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I mean, we're already at the bottom though.
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Am 39 and feel this
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... and I can see how I contributed to things going to shit, too. And I did a lot of good things, too.
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I'm just really wondering... To the trump voters in the US, is this what you wanted? Do you really think and feel that things have improved? Do you really think the world is a better, safer, place now than it was 10 years ago?
It's like, we had issues for sure, but they were manageable. We had climate change at a critical level but we could still stave off the worst of it and now we're speed running to something worse than the worst predictions that were made. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if earth is like Venus not 200 years from now due to some runaway effect.
I mean, we had a nice run but fuck you, you really really ruined the world for everyone including yourself. I sincerely hope you're happy because then at least someone will before were all dead.
Fuck you.
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Spoiler alert, no one over 40 does either.
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That's nonsense.
Good things will be happening all the time!
Just not to you.
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Yes
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It's really sad that many young people are so pessimistic about the future. Despite some setbacks the last years, in many ways the world is still in a better place than it has ever been in human history.
Child mortality is still lower than ever, (extreme) poverty is still on a declining trend, we're actually on track to stop the worst climate change (thanks to massive Chinese investments), AI could vastly improve our lives in the future...
That said we do live in uncertain times, fascism is on the rise again, a nuclear war could still kill us all, fighting climate change is not done,l and AI could ruine all our lives; but pessimism is not the right mindset.
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Extreme poverty may be declining but that doesn’t mean more people in the west are not being pushed into food scarcity due to stagnated wages and corporate greed.
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It remains sad that in the world with enough artificial nitrate fertiliser to produce enough food for everyone in abundance and enough food in abundance to feed everyone in the west companies are still putting perfectly edible food into dumpsters and then covering them in motor oil to prevent freegans and dumpster divers while elsewere, famine still happens.
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In the West too life is generally better than ever, also for people under 40
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We have climbed so high as a species in such a short time that we genuinely can't remember where the ground was when we started.
Climate change will be devastating. But for most of human life, the fear of the future was much closer. It wasn't about the next five or ten years, it wasn't about the world we were leaving for our children - it was about the food we were feeding our children today. It was about making it through the next winter. It was about survival.
We didn't have refrigeration, penicillin, HVAC, germ theory... people weren't worried about undervaccination because there was no such thing as vaccination.
Even in recent history. In the 1920s, we had a war so huge and devastating and terrifying that they called it the war to end all wars.
Then they almost immediately did it again, but bigger.
Every adult in the early 20th century lived through the greatest horror in mankind's history so far. The first heavy machine guns, the first aerial bombers, the first atom bomb. Then the massive, unstable world powers spent decades building up an arsenal of global annihilation, and very nearly triggered that annihilation at least twice.
All of human existence - from the daily survival of pre-industry, to The Jungle of industrialization, the still-ongoing plague of tuberculosis ("consumption"), the brutal violence of the 20th century - all of it - has been a struggle to survive.
Human existence has always been, on some level, terrifying. Disease, famine, war - these apocalyptic horsemen weren't on the horizon, they were constant companions to historical humans. And that's not even getting into all of the historical oppression and bigotry that always has been.
But people weren't constantly scared by default. They made art, wrote books, told stories. Started families, had children, almost half of their children died as children, had more children anyway.
Humans just lived. This isn't the first time we've faced self destruction. This isn't the first time we've faced oppression, tyranny, poverty, and yes, even climate disasters. A drought could devastate nations. A harsh winter could leave no survivors. Entire settlements just... failed.
Humans are still thriving compared to one or two lifetimes ago. It feels like we plateau'd and then began to decline - because in a sense we did. We were taking massive leaps toward the future with every passing decade, and now we just feel like we're making incremental improvements in meaningless gadgets, while social progress stalls - or worse- actively regresses.
But we live in the future. That's why we plateau'd. We made it. Humans have effectively gained the power to make life on Earth as it is in Heaven, and we just choose not to. We choose other things, mainly because a small handful of humans have the power to make those choices for the rest of us.
That doesn't mean we should lose faith. Humans can still make a golden age of the future, climate change or not.
We just need to fight for it. We live in unprecedented times, and we are capable of unprecedented things. We absolutely have the capability to make the future better than the past.
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I do joke a lol, but things in many areas are so much better than 30-50 years ago and considering Brits in WW II had to turn out all their lights to hinder German bombings - most of us are being peddled fear by the media and it's not THAT bad.
Where did you get the climate hope bit? last articles I glazed over were 'we missed 1.5 deg target and instead put the foot on the pedal to make it faster' and 'climate migrations coming and mass famine'.
Sounder doomerism to me but I don't really have a good source to be optimistic at all.
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Your daily life not being an actual warzone is an extremely low bar to set for things not being bad.
Also the climate claim they made was pure fantasy.
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In short, solar prices are declining exponentially and deployment is growing exponentially. There are even companies claiming to be able to make efuels from air using solar cheaper than fossil fuels by the end of the decade.
Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie is a good book if you want to read something optimistic.
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we’re actually on track to stop the worst climate change (thanks to massive Chinese investments)
No, we damn well aren't.
AI could vastly improve our lives in the future
It could also make it vastly worse in the future, which is the more likely scenario.
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Wait, your parents don't understand that everybody under 40 has the same outlook on life? What a pair of idiots.
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